


meet your match

by novensides



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, F/M, Gen, Harry Potter was Raised by Other(s), Horcrux Hunting, Kidnapped Harry, Past Fleur Delacour/Bill Weasley, Triwizard Tournament
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 10:35:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16116632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novensides/pseuds/novensides
Summary: In another world, Regulus Black was prepared to face his death in order to steal Voldemort's horcrux. In this world, he doesn't have to - and everything changes from there.A story - part time-travel, part do-over - told in reverse.





	meet your match

**Author's Note:**

> A quick note before we begin: this story is written in reverse chronological order, meaning the first section you will see is in fact the last section of the story, and so on. Please read it in this order! It was written that way and meant to be understood that way. You won't be doing yourself any favours by trying to read it backwards, I promise.

**boy//harry//life**

vii.

He drew his wand.

 

vi.

“ _Traitor!”_ Voldemort hissed.

“Well, yes,” replied the man addressed. “For the last – oh, sixteen years?” he said lightly, concealing his fear under a thin veneer of arrogance. “I’d wondered when you’d notice.”

“I think he’s noticing now,” mused Harry – Harry, who had recently returned from the dead. Harry who stood now, impossibly, before an equally impossible man, if you could call Voldemort that.

“I’ll deal with your treachery,” snarled the newly resurrected Voldemort, “after _the boy_.” He turned to Harry, red eyes narrowing.

And Harry smiled, because that was what exactly what he’d hoped would happen.

 

v.

“Is he dead?”

The voice sounded like the hiss of wind through a crack in the walls, high and cold.

A man leaned over Harry. His dark hair fell around Harry’s face, hiding them, like a curtain or a veil. “Well, are you?” _Concern._ Well-masked, but there.

 _Really, I’m touched,_ thought Harry. The corner of his mouth twitched.

“What do _you_ think?’ he breathed.

“He’s dead,” the man called out, though he sounded annoyed about it. That was alright, thought Harry. He usually sounded annoyed about something. Voldemort would hardly notice.

Harry’s eyes remained closed, and he felt, rather than saw, as the man stood. He knew what would come next – the dark lord’s dismissive gesture, the man’s retreat into the circle of Death Eaters.

And then he heard something else – a swish of robes, and then the sound of muffled cries.

He opened his eyes just in time to see a black cloud settle over the Death Eaters, Regulus Black at the edge of it, one hand still outstretched.

“What is _that?”_ he asked as he sprung up.

“Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder,” muttered the man, striding away from the swath of impenetrable dark with his wand outstretched. “Could you at least _try_ not to be killed?”

Harry agreed readily. “Once was enough for me.”

 

iv.

He took a breath.

 

iii.

Dying was even easier than he thought it would be.

There was nothing on the other side. He had no intention of staying. First he was thinking of his family, and all the people waiting for him, and the voice in the back of his head that said _you’d better survive this, or I’ll kill you myself -_ and then, suddenly, he was alive again, lying on the hard ground.

 

ii.

The figure that rose from the cauldron, skeletal and pale, was dressed in robes, his wand returned.

 _So this is him_ , thought Harry.

As they waited for his summoned Death Eaters to come, Voldemort spoke. “I have been waiting for your return, all these years, just as the world has been waiting for mine.” Harry tuned him out, entertaining himself by wandlessly untying his bonds. “Imagine my surprise when your name was drawn from the goblet – when I discovered you were living, after all.”

“Bit of a shock to everyone,” said Harry agreeably. The ropes unknotted and pooled around his wrists.

“ _Yes,”_ Voldemort hissed. “You are alive. But not for long. Soon my Death Eaters will arrive, and we will duel.”

 _No, not for long,_ thought Harry. His scar throbbed as if in agreement. The graveyard began to fill. Voldemort welcomed and scolded and cursed his followers and Harry let his head loll back against the stone. No one even seemed to notice that his bonds, when vanished, were already loose.

Finally, he was given back his wand. He was told to stand, to bow.

It wasn’t much of a duel. The spell that left Harry’s wand was only colored light. The spell that met him was acid green and smelt of ozone and he made no move to avoid it. He thought he heard a sharp intake of breath behind him and knew that breath belonged to Regulus Black and silently willed the man to keep quiet.

Harry was struck with the killing curse, and he fell backwards, and he closed his eyes.

 

i.

Harry had landed in the graveyard, taken stock of his surroundings – a cauldron, some noxious potion inevitably containing or soon to contain human remains, armed Death Eater coming towards him, and – _oh_. The snake. He’d thought _I can work with this,_ and he banished the cup in his hand – the portkey – wordlessly at the two-meter snake slithering through the high grass. He was delighted when it struck and animal and cup both vanished with a _pop._

 _“Nagini!”_ a strange, high voice had said, from a bundle of robes on the ground. Then, “it’s of no consequence – she’ll return to me. Barty, take his wand!”

Harry’s scar was stinging as his wand was summoned.

 _The snake is heading your way,_ he thought silently, urgently at the other end of a tether which crossed an immeasurable distance. _If Neville doesn’t kill it—_

 _I’m sure he’ll manage,_ came a voice back. _But I’ll warn the others just in case. I’m outside the castle’s anti-apparition wards now. I’ll come as soon as I can find you._

 _I think things are about to get messy,_ Harry thought.

 _I can tell,_ came the voice, and it felt like someone was laughing inside his head. _Be safe._

 _Always,_ he thought, and let himself be tied to a headstone. He resisted the urge to roll his eyes as his blood was drawn, and gave into the urge as someone who could only have been Barty Crouch, Jr. deftly sliced off his own hand to drop it into the roiling potion. The man couldn’t see him, anyway – he was facing the cauldron.

And now Harry waited, tied to the stone, wondering, as Voldemort’s homunculus was dropped into the potion, if it was always meant to play out this way – did all roads lead here, to this graveyard?

He’d grown up hearing so much about _prophecy_ , about _fate_ , and now he wondered if it was fated that he would come here – that he would always come here, in any timeline, in any universe. That his blood would be used to bring back the man he was destined to destroy – or rather, bring him back _for now_. Because Harry had every intention of ending this tonight.

He _would_ kill Voldemort – and that, he was sure, was where every road led.

Maybe things weren’t meant to go _quite_ like this. Maybe they’d gone about things in the wrong order. But – what was that Muggle saying? _All’s well that ends well?_

The cauldron bubbled. The incanting stopped. From the mist, something rose. _  
_

**  
**

**snake//neville//secrecy**

vii.

A snake appeared in the hall outside the Transfiguration classroom of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. A golden cup clattered to the ground.

 _Well,_ thought the boy who had been standing in that corridor, _Harry did say there might be one._

Only, Neville amended, griping his wand in one hand and the dagger Harry had given him in the other, he’d neglected to mention it would be about _seven feet long._ The snake appeared to be in shock, if such a thing could apply to snakes, and writhed somewhat harmlessly on the stone floors, but he was sure it would come to its senses at any moment.

 _You can do this!_ said a cheerful little voice in his head that sounded very much like Harry Potter, and really, when had _that_ started happening?

The snake seemed to right itself. Neville threw the dagger. His aim was practiced and precise. It struck the snake right below the head, and apparently whatever poison the thing had been dipped in worked _quickly_ , because he – she? gave a mighty heave and hissed once before falling still. Neville sent a cutting curse down the hall, too, just in case, and lopped the snake’s head off just below where the dagger had pierced, and breathed a sigh of relief as it rolled away and down the hall. Then he summoned the dagger, being very careful not to touch the blade, and replaced it in the sheath he’d hidden on his person before the task.

Security for this bloody tournament was bloody _abysmal._

He regarded the golden cup now that the snake was dead. He’d seen Harry take it, just a few minutes before, and disappear. A portkey, and he hadn’t seemed at all surprised at that as he popped away. “Wish me luck?” he’d said, just before he gripped the handle.

 

vi.

“…and if you do see the snake,” Harry said, “stab it with that dagger I gave you.”

He said this in the sort of tone one might say “hand me my quill, will you?” or “pass the mashed potatoes.”

“About that,” said Neville.

“Look, you’ve had loads of practice,” said Harry, patting him on the shoulder, “you’ll be great. Just don’t let it prick you – it’s poisoned. Well, coated in basilisk venom, actually, but who’s counting—"

“Yes,” said Neville, as if that weren’t completely mad, “you mentioned, but again—”

“And don’t let the snake bite you, either. Pretty venomous, apparently. Just loads of poison going around, basically. If it does bite you, call Briony. She’s got antivenin on her somewhere…”

“Yeah, right, will do, but—”

“You’re really alright, you know that, Neville? Wish I’d gone to Hogwarts, we might’ve been friends sooner. Hey – if I die, you think you’ll be named champion? I mean, probably. Process of elimination.”

“I,” Neville said, “You know? I honestly don’t know.”

“I hope you are. Anyway, don’t take it too personally, right? About the cup? It’s just that I’m pretty sure something’s going to happen as soon as I touch it.”

“No, no, I believe you. It’s fine. I just don’t know—”

“And if Voldemort shows up personally – which, again, I don’t think will happen, but _if—”_

“If that happens I’m probably dead,” said Neville, practically.

“ _Or_ you could throw that dagger at him, is what I was going to say. Or run. Anyway – I’m going to grab this cup now. Remember – snake, knife.” He made a throwing motion, and then gave Neville a jaunty thumbs-up.

“I’ve got it,” said Neville, who was really beginning to question his newfound friendship with Harry Potter.

“Brilliant,” said Harry, reaching forward. “I owe you one.”

 

v.

At the end of the corridor stood a pedestal, and on that stood a gleaming, golden cup.

Harry was already there. He waved his wand around the trophy experimentally.

“Oh,” said Neville, “you’ve won?” He wondered why the other boy hadn’t taken it yet. Touching it, Ludo Bagman had explained, would alert the judges. It would tell them which champion had reached the end of the castle-wide scavenger hunt that served as the final task, had found all their clues and been led here, to the very end.

“I’m not sure yet,” said Harry, but it was as if he were speaking to himself.

“You got here first,” Neville pointed out.

“Yes, but the competition was rigged,” he said, finally looking up. “So don’t feel bad – I’ll bet you’d have won if it were fair.”

Neville wasn’t sure he quite believed that, but the things he’d found along the way to this corridor seemed to support Harry’s theory. Magnus Odinsson of Durmstrang had the glazed look of an _Imperius_ in his eyes, last Neville had seen him. Briony Aubin was nowhere to be seen, although Harry didn’t seem concerned at that, so Neville divined that this was part of whatever grand plan he was now sure the two had.

“Okay,” Harry was saying. “Okay. This is it. Neville? Can you do something for me?”

 

iv.

Studying with Harry Potter turned, after the second task, into practicing magic in a room that appeared when you wished for it and became whatever you wanted. Neville thought it was one of the most magical places he’d ever seen.

“How do you even _know_ about this?” he wondered after he’d been dragged there. “You don’t even _go_ to Hogwarts.”

“This castle has all sorts of secrets,” said Briony mysteriously. The blonde Beauxbâtons champion seemed to go wherever Harry went, so it was little surprise that she’d come to study with them.

He had balked, at first, when Harry tried to teach him to – well, he wasn’t sure if there _was_ a word for “throw knives at things”, but Harry had only shrugged and said he was sure it would come in hand someday. “When could it possibly?” Neville wondered. 

"Trust me on this one," said Harry, and Neville found strangely, even though he was sure the other boy was hiding something - hiding many somethings - that he did.

 

iii.

The second task, a trip through the Forbidden Forest for a charmed feather, unseen and undetected by the many terrible things that called those woods home, had ended with Neville in second place.

He would have been happier about that if he didn’t think he’d seen Briony Aubin deliberately stalling for time just outside a copse of aspen.

 _What are you two up to?_ he’d thought as he walked by. She’d glanced up as if she heard him. Smiled. 

When the task was over, Harry – who had won first place – glanced up at the stands somewhere Neville’s eyes couldn’t follow and waved, grinning wildly.

 _So his family’s up there_ , thought Neville, who had wondered just as much as anyone else about the recently re-appeared Boy-Who-Lived. He wondered all sorts of things about the Boy-Who-Lived – or, more accurately, about his sort-of friend, Harry. He thought there were things much more mysterious about him than wherever he’d been these last sixteen years.

 

ii.

“Do you want to study with me? In the library?” Neville nearly tripped over his robes as Harry Potter appeared at his side, striding along with him as though he’d been there all the while.

“Er. Sorry, what?”

It wasn’t the first time Potter had spoken to him – he had been friendly through the weighing of the wands, and through the farce of an interview with the _Prophet_ where Skeeter’s attention had rested solely on Harry Potter even though he gave so many non-answers Neville was surprised she'd even managed to spin an article about it. He'd been perfectly genial through the first task where the unprecedented _four_ champions had fished faked Augury eggs out of the Whomping Willow. But this was the first time he’d spoken to Neville  _alone._

“For the second task,” he expounded. “You _did_ figure out the clue, didn’t you?”

“…yes,” said Neville finally. “We have to find something in the Forbidden Forest.”

“Mm, exactly,” Harry agreed, grabbing him by the elbow. “And I’ve heard you’re quite good at Herbology, which I can only imagine will come in handy. Some of the plants in the forest are supposed to be _nasty.”_

“Look, Potter – er, can I call you _Potter?_ Do you prefer—”

“Oh, Potter’s fine,” the other boy said, waving a hand. “The kneazle’s out of the bag on that one, don’t you think? But why not call me Harry? Easier.”

 “—right,” said Neville, “Er, call me Neville then, I guess. But here's the thing - we’re representing different schools; should we _really_ be working together?”

“Just between us,” said Potter, slinging an arm over Neville's shoulder and dropping his voice to a whisper. “This tournament? It’s not what it looks like. I don’t think a little inter-school cooperation is going to do any harm.”

 

i.

On Halloween night, when the Goblet of Fire spat out Neville’s name as Hogwarts’ champion, something funny had happened. A weight had lifted from his shoulders. _Something important is taking place_ , he thought.

_I am going to do something important._

Not even the presumed-dead, missing-for-sixteen-years Harry Potter’s name coming from the cup just after his could take that away.

**  
**

**diadem//briony//wit**

vii.

“Why Longbottom?” asked Briony. They were sitting in the Ravenclaw Common Room, tucked away in plush blue armchairs.

“Well,” said Harry, “I've got a good feeling about it, and he's got shockingly good aim. Also," he added, "the thing we came for is already taken care of.”

“Is that _really_ all we came for?”

“Ah, no, I don’t think so. I think Mum was right, about the Tournament, about everything… happening again, so to speak. And then there's the snake."

“We don’t even know if the snake’s a horcrux,” said Briony reasonably.

Harry frowned. “I think it is. I saw it in a dream.”

“Oh, well, if you saw it in a _dream,”_ she said airily, but there was an undercurrent of something else, something strained and tense. Unspoken between them was the implication that the theories they’d come up with long ago about Harry’s paradoxical existence might be true.

 _But,_ thought Briony _, theories were one thing._ Facing the idea that Harry might hold a fragment of Voldemort’s soul head-on was quite another.

“Do you think they know?” Briony asked. “About you?”

Harry looked pensive. She imagined he didn’t like to speculate on whether his guardians knew he was a horcrux any more than she did. “I think they must suspect,” he said finally. “They must realize, if they do, that there’s only so much we can do.”

“ _They_ can do,” she corrected. “ _We_ are going to – going to do everything we can. We’re not going to just let this play out. We’ll spin it in our favor. If Voldemort means to trap you with the tournament, we’ll turn it around on him. _We’ll_ outwit him, trap _him._ We’ll do what we can to get you to the end—”

“Oi, I can win on my own merit, thanks—”

“I’m sure. Odinsson’s not much of a challenge, and I’ll hold back. Neville we can get to the end, somehow, if you really insist, and if that falls through, I suppose I can always take care of the snake."

“Or mum will.”

“Right.”

“We’re really doing this? I mean – letting you…” _Die_ went unspoken.

“We have to, don’t we? Don’t look so glum. We’ll have loads of fun before that.”

 

vi.

“Do you want to do this, or should I?” asked Briony, wand pointed at the glittering diadem hovering between them in the air. It was pretty, really – all the prettier for being surrounded by junk. And that wasn’t even taking into account its _history._ Being matched with the Ravenclaws for the tournament had given her a certain appreciation for their house. She was quite sure none of them would want to befriend her if they knew she’d destroyed one of their Founder’s precious artifacts.

Still, there was nothing for it.

“You go ahead,” said Harry. “You’ve never gotten to do one.”

“Neither have you,” she pointed out.

“I’ll get my chance,” he said wryly. “Fire or venom?”

“Fire, I think,” she said. “We ought to save that venom for something interesting.”

“Right. Well, don’t burn the whole room down,” he said.

She shot him an offended glare. “I’d never.”

 

v.

Avoiding the whispers in the halls of Hogwarts had proved as good as excuse as any to track down the horcrux everyone seemed convinced was in the castle.

 _Well,_ amended Briony, _everyone who matters._ That, of course, was a short list – it currently, in residence, not counting the people an owl away, consisted of Harry. Harry wanted to befriend the Hogwarts champion, Neville Longbottom, and she was probably going to humor him eventually, because Harry had all sorts of funny ideas that turned out to be oddly prescient, but for now – for now, there was only Harry. Harry who she was protecting from gossip and rumor. Harry, who she was protecting from Rita Skeeter, who she hoped Searlait would _eat_ if she saw her again in beetle form. And then there was Dumbledore—

“What _about_ him?” asked Harry. Briony hadn’t realized she’d spoken aloud. Or maybe she hadn’t – their link, magically imposed thought-communication, wasn’t _quite_ settled yet. She hoped it did by the end of this tournament. She had the sense they’d need it.

“Has he tried to speak with you?”

“He tried.”

“What did you tell him?”

Harry shrugged. “Nothing.”

She raised her eyebrows. “And he took that…”

“Not well,” grinned Harry, “But—alas. I’m officially, legally an adult. Nothing they can do if I don’t press charges myself. Kidnapping laws in the magical world are _quite_ lax, did you know?”

“I did, as it turns out.”

Harry shrugged again. She hoped he wasn’t having a crisis of conscience. He did have those now and then, but she thought they’d agreed that there was very little, at this stage, that Dumbledore could do for them. He’d been a friend of Harry’s parents – his real, original parents – but they were doing just fine without him, thanks.

“You need a distraction,” she said, seizing his arm. “Rumor has it…”

“Rumor?”

“Well, and a few chatty Hogwarts students. Anyway, they say that somewhere in this draughty castle is a room where lost things go. Don’t you think Voldemort would’ve gone there, too? Wasn’t he a lost thing?”

“Something like that,” agreed Harry.

“Come on,” she said, “if we find it that’ll be one thing off our to-do list. Anyway, it’s either this or you let me track down the basilisk.”

“You _wouldn’t_ ,” said Harry with wide eyes. Briony did so enjoy these rare occasions where she was able to surprise him.

“And why not? It’s your birthright!”

“Isn’t either. I’m only a pretender to the throne.”

“Oh, don’t be silly. You _won_ it, as far as I’m concerned, by conquest.” She was sure that Salazar Slytherin himself would agree. Power won by conquest was still very much power.

“Oh, Merlin,” said Harry. “Look, let’s burn that bridge when we come to it.”

 

iv..

“Everyone is staring at you, you know.”

It was true. Half the eyes in the Great Hall were on them.

“Let them stare,” shrugged Harry.

Briony shrugged back and took a sip of pumpkin juice. “And talking about you—”

“Let them talk.”

“I heard one girl say that you’re supposed to have been in hiding all these years – training, in secret, to become some sort of, oh. I don’t know, exactly. She didn’t seem to, either.”

“Super-Auror?”

“Something like that,” she agreed, amused. If only they knew.

“People do keep coming up to me, asking me what happened.”

Briony snorted. They kept coming up to her, too, for all the good it did them. She had ways of fluttering her eyelashes until people forgot what they’d asked her. “What do you tell them?” she asked Harry.

“That I was stolen by fairies, mostly. Or else I pretend I don’t speak English.”

“ _Please_ tell Dad you think he’s a fairy. _Please._ I’m begging you.”

Harry laughed and kicked her under the table.

It was strange, still, thinking of him as _Harry_ here in this public hall _._ For as long as she could remember, he had been two people – Harry at home, and Noel everywhere else. It was strange to have so many secrets collapse so suddenly. Upholding them had occupied so much of her energy that now she hardly knew what to do. She sent Searlait out to spy, and she wrote letters to her mother, and she waited.

They were all waiting, really.

_Biding our time._

 

iii.

“ _Now what,”_ came a voice in the back of her head.

She met Noel’s eyes. He was seated, still, at the Beauxbâtons table, gripping the edge of it with both hands, his knuckles white, and the Goblet of Fire had just spat out his name – his real name, the one he’d been born with, the one he hadn’t used in public in years and years.

“ _Now you stand,”_ she murmured back. “ _You haven’t got a choice – if you don’t, you lose your magic_.”

“ _Suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,”_ he thought. “ _We pretty well knew this coming. It’s all happened before and it’ll all happen again, etc.”_

 _“Stop philosophizing,”_ she thought, “ _and get up.”_

He stood. The hall roared.

He approached the Cup and its guardians. From where she stood at the edge of the room, having refused to join the other champions in the hall beyond, Briony thought she could make out the words “ _what is it?”_ from the Headmaster of Hogwarts’ mouth.

“That’s me,” said Noel – said Harry, she supposed, because there was no point really in calling him anything else, now. “I’m Harry Potter.”

The old man at the cup faltered.

“I’ll swear on my magic if I have to,” Harry sighed.

“ _Dramatic,”_ she thought at him, pointedly. She couldn’t wait to tell their parents.

 

ii.

At the feast, Briony toyed with her cutlery, glancing around the table at the familiar faces of their classmates and less-familiar ones of the Ravenclaws of Hogwarts.

“So,” said a boy with straight brown hair and a clever sort of face, “which one of you will it be?”

She looked up, sharply.

“Aubin, was it?” he asked.

She softened her expression. “Briony Aubin, yes. And this is my brother, Noel.”

“Terry Boot,” said the boy. “You don’t sound French.”

“We’ve spent time in Britain,” said Noel, with a smile like a Cheshire cat. Briony suspected he was enjoying this and nearly stomped on his foot, but then thought she might as well let him. _The calm before the storm_ and all that. He should enjoy his anonymity while it lasted, because they were under no illusions that they’d make it through this year with the secret of his true identity intact.

The boy – Boot – hummed noncommittally. “Twins?”

“Of course,” said Briony in the face of his obvious skepticism. It was true that they looked little alike, except in the details. She had pale blonde hair and Noel had black, although there was a certain likeness in the straightness of their features, and the gray that streaked through his green eyes matched hers. “What did you mean, earlier?”

“I mean,” said Boot, “That your school’s champion – it’s clearly going to be one of you two. The others are looking at you like it’s a forgone conclusion. So which one do you think it’ll be?”

Noel grinned in that disarming sort of way Briony knew came from studying their father. He, like her, had ways of throwing people off-guard. His natural skill for it was weaker, but his learned ones were nearly as good. “Maybe both,” he said.

After all, they’d been told that having two champions for a school had happened once before – or would happen, or rather, would have happened, three years ago in another universe.

Boot looked dubious. Beside him, Briony’s dormmate, a girl called Heloise, sighed into her soup.

“ _Are you even going to put your name in?”_ Briony thought pointedly at her brother.

Noel jerked. “ _Oh, but that’s weird.”_

 _“Get used to it,”_ she sent back.

“ _Of course I didn’t,”_ he said. “ _What would be the point? Regulus and Mum both think this has been set up on purpose – my name is going to be in there either way.”_

_“Harry Potter’s name.”_

_“Same difference.”_

_“Well, maybe I wanted to see once and for all which of us was the better student.”_

And then he snorted inside her head.

“ _Oh, that_ is _weird,”_ she said.

Briony retreated with a headache and roll of her eyes. She looked around the hall – at Hogwarts, the school that Noel, at least, should have gone to.

What would that have been like, she wondered?

 

i.

“There’s going to be a tournament. The Triwizard Tournament,” said their mother. She had called them into the sitting room while they were packing their trunks for their seventh and final school year. “I had hoped…” she said, and then trailed off. It was evident she wasn’t sure quite what to think. You’d have to know her very well to spot the stress – her brow never wrinkled, and she sat quite regally in her favorite chair, never one to give into things like pacing – but it was there.

“We’re going to Hogwarts?” Harry ventured. Briony tried to tell if he was excited about that or not. She thought he just might be.

“I suppose I should be glad it took this long,” their mother said. “It was – how do you say? It was fate. I'll come to the tasks, of course - I'm sure one of you will be in the Tournament, if not both. Funny - going back to where it all began."

“Don’t worry,” said Briony, sitting down at her mother’s feet like a little girl, letting her play with the long strands of her blonde hair in a way that always soothed her nerves. “We’ll be alright.”

Later, in her room, she said to Harry, “We should prepare. I think this is our chance to try that spell.”

 “I _really_ don’t want you in my head,” teased Harry, tossing a balled-up bit of parchment at her head.

“You will when it comes down to it,” she said haughtily, sending the paper back at him with a flick of her wrist.

Her trunk was still half packed and she turned her attentions to it. _I ought to pack warmer,_ she thought.

When they came to Scotland, they came in enormous carriages drawn by winged horses. Madame Maxime had always liked big gestures. The massive Abraxans and appearance of their headmistress in all her expansive glory explained the looks on the Hogwarts’ students faces as they disembarked – but then there were the other looks. Searching, as if the people who gave them were looking for someone particular in the crowd. Briony imagined the Durmstrang students would be subject to similar scrutiny.

 _So Voldemort’s not the only one hoping to find Harry Potter’s been secreted away at one of these schools,_ she thought.

She took her so-called twin brother by the elbow as they lined up in pairs, delighted in the knowledge that no one would spare him a second look – or rather, they’d _look,_ but for the same reasons that people generally looked at the twins. They had a funny magnetism about them – a way of drawing people’s eyes as if my magic.

It was its own sort of disguise.

 

**cup//sirius//redemption**

vii.

He’d been dubious at first that the twins could learn to wield Fiendfyre, and then impressed when they managed it.

They were fifteen. They explained to him that they had a particular affinity for fire. It came from their mother, they said.

“Yes, well. She thinks you need to know how to destroy these things,” he said, “Just in case. _Personally_ , I’m hoping this is the last one left.”

“Doubt it,” said Briony. He sighed and looked between her and Harry.

“And you know this because…”

“Arithmancy,” she replied primly. Harry snickered at her side, and then sobered and the two exchanged a sudden, solemn look. He noticed but didn’t bother asking what they were thinking about. They’d never tell. They were better at being twins than he imagined most real ones were.

“Right,” he said, bringing the two teenagers back to reality. “So. Stand back. I’m going to burn this one now.”  

They both nodded seriously, and he set Hufflepuff’s cup down on the lawn and pointed his wand to it.

“Mum’s going to kill you if you scorch her grass,” said Briony from behind him.

“I’d like to see her try!” said Sirius Black, buoyed by the spectacular luck of that week. For once in his life, things seemed to be going right.

 

vi.

“If you’ll just sign here,” said the goblin, stabbing at the parchment with one yellowed, over-long fingernail.

“Sign,” repeated Sirius with more caution than he generally exercised. “Just sign? With ink? Not, you know, blood, or—”

The goblin made a face. At least, he thought it made a face – it was hard to tell with goblins. “With ink. Yes. Sign, and the vault is yours.”

Sirius resisted the urge to rub his hands together and cackle with glee. All these years later, who’d have thought a bit of _paperwork_ would be all that stood between him and perhaps the only useful thing his cousin might ever do for him. He was _this_ close to finding the horcrux they thought might be hidden in Bellatrix’s vault.

He signed with a flourish and just held back from dotting the I’s in his name with hearts. Something told him the goblins wouldn’t appreciate it.

“Very well,” said the goblin behind the desk. “You’ve now officially reclaimed on behalf of the Black family the vault of your cousin, Bellatrix Lestrange, for such time as she or her spouse remain in Azkaban. Would you like to proceed to the vault now?”

“Yes,” said Sirius with obvious relish. “Let’s.”

 

v.

The headlines that morning were all about the sudden capture of Peter Pettigrew, the overnight secret trial that proved Sirius Black’s innocence. Sirius read it over a bowl of oatmeal and snorted incredulously in several sections, spraying oats on a picture of Bartemius Crouch’s pinched face. _Serves him right, the smug prick._

He remembered then that there was a possibility that Barty Crouch had broken his son out of Azkaban and had him living somewhere under the Imperius. He’d done it before, apparently, though there was no way of knowing if he had in this timeline, and no real way of doing anything about it barring breaking into a respected Ministry official’s house or writing an anonymous letter to the DMLE. Neither possibility filled him with much hope.

Anyway – loathe as he was to admit it – perhaps it was for the best that Barty Crouch, Jr. be let to return his old master, as he likely would if he were indeed out of his cell, and be the one who brought him back. If they were going to off Voldemort, someone had to resurrect him, first, and it was clear now that wasn’t going to be Peter.

He fancied, for a moment, what it would be like to be at the mercy of _Wormtail,_ anyway. Voldemort should be grateful to them, Sirius thought. They’d done him a favor.

As a footnote – a bit of wishful, fanciful thinking that the papers allowed themselves now and then on the subject of the Boy-Who-Lived – the story he was reading wondered if Harry Potter might soon be returned to the wizarding world. Perhaps, they speculated, if someone was keeping him safe from his parents’ traitor, they would see there was no need and let him return, the prodigal son, to Hogwarts.

Sirius put aside the paper with another snort. So far as he knew, Harry would probably never step foot in Hogwarts. The idea didn’t fill him with as much regret as it used to.

And anyway, he had more important things to worry about – like arranging a meeting with the goblins. He needed to have a word about a vault.

 

iv.

“It’s done,” Sirius said as the other owner of the house Apparated into the front hall, removing her gray cloak with a flourish and hanging it from a hook.

“Yes, I know,” she said with bemused patience, smoothing her robes and shaking out her blonde hair, although both were, as ever, eerily perfect. “I was _there.”_

“Right, well, I couldn’t see into the audience of the court. There’s a spell for that, I think. Anyway – how did you get _in_ to a last minute, emergency trial? Of a high-profile wanted murderer and in the middle of the night, no less?”

She smiled prettily and blinked at him. He laughed. Being long since immune to her charms, he’d nearly forgotten that in most circumstances and with most people she could more or less ask for what she wanted and receive it. “Don’t flatter yourself,” she added. “You’re a _former_ wanted murderer, now. Have you thought about what you’ll do next?”

“Me? What will _we_ do next?”

She smiled beatifically. Clearly he’d asked the right question. “Dumbly-dore will want to question you,” she cautioned. She’d never quite gotten down the pronunciation of the name.

“Yeah,” he agreed, raking a hand through his hair. “I thought I might send him an owl and head it off. Remus, too.”

She hummed noncommittally.

“I won’t tell them anything about you. Or Briony, or Harry…”

“Of course not,” she said, obviously certain of his loyalty, or pretending to be certain, at least.

“For the rest of it, I’ll pretty much stick to the truth – that I’ve been hiding out all these years and hunting for Peter. And my occlumency’s good enough, I think. I mean, I was able to get through that trial without slipping up, so – but the real question is, what do we do about the, you know, _things?”_

“Things?” she echoed, although it sounded more like “ _tings”._ Her accent made itself known most clearly when she was emotional, under stress or – he hoped, as at present – relieved.

“Horcruxes,” he clarified. “With me cleared, there’s more I can do to help hunt, more places I can follow. Places my name can get me into, even,” he added, the latter with the general wince that accompanied any reminder of his family’s legacy.

“Actually,” she said slowly, “I have been thinking – there is _one_ place that I’d like to look that your name, especially, can get you into. We know the diary was with Malfoy, and he was one of the most – _loyal_ Death Eaters. So, I think we search the belongings of another loyal Death Eater…”

“My cousin?”

“Yes,” Fleur agreed. “In my other life, Harry and his friends broke into the bank, into Gringotts. They must have had a reason for it. I thought at the time it was for some weapon or tool, but now I think it was something else.”

 

iii.

Sirius returned to the house in Mont-Ventoux where he’d spent nearly fourteen years now, a free man at last. Of course, he had, in a sense, been free all along – he was never imprisoned, though the warrant had existed for his arrest. And he wouldn’t be able to take up his old life, to be _Sirius Black_ full-time for a very long while, if ever – after all, there were people who relied on his identity as Alexandre Aubin.

Still, now he could go down the street with his own face on, and he felt lighter for it.

 

ii.

Sirius received the Floo call on a sunny Fall afternoon.

“We’ve found him,” said his brother, smiling tightly with a subdued streak of the fabled Black vengeance.

“Where?” he said, already rising to gather his cloak and wand. There was no need to ask _who_. There was only one him it could possibly be.

“In Diagon Alley, of all places. Fleur cornered him and Apparated away before he knew what was what. We have him trapped in Grimmauld Place,” said Regulus. “In the old… wine cellar.”

“Right,” said Sirius, who knew perfectly well the old wine cellar of his familial home was imbued with spells better suited to keeping prisoners than storing drink. “I’ll be there in five.”

“Don’t get jumpy,” cautioned Regulus.

“Which of us is the oldest, here?” he shot back, shrugging on his cloak.

“I’m only saying,” said Regulus, and Sirius frowned. He was hot-headed, true. He wanted his revenge, certainly. It was always at the back of his mind – it was there as the twins grew up, and every time he’d disguised himself because needed to visit Britain for one reason or another, and when he stayed back in the white house on the lavender-covered hill while Fleur took the children to Rue Mine to buy their school supplies for the first time and he’d hesitated to accompany them lest his glamor fail and he find himself hauled away by the _Sûreté._

It was what he dreamed of, now – more often than he dreamed of James’ laugh the last time he’d seen him. He thought about catching Peter every day, of clearing his name, of starting new.

But he was also perfectly aware that he had to do what was best for his – well. Some streak of stubbornness or else rebelliousness held him back from calling them what they really were, his _family,_ but then, who else would be better suited for the name? His parents were both long dead, now. His brother was a half-decent person, and the group that consisted of him and Fleur and Harry and his pseudo-sister, well…

Right. So he’d become the kind of person, over time, who did things for his _family._ Who had one to speak of.

Things changed, he supposed.

 

i.

They had been searching for Peter for what felt like a very long time.

**  
**

**ring//regulus//loyalty**

vii.

“I trust that you can remove them?” Fleur asked. It might have been an innocent question, or a challenge, or an admonishment. It was hard to tell with Fleur.

He said _yes_ anyway. Yes, he could remove them. In another world, he might have been a cursebreaker, perhaps worked for the goblins. He was good at intricate works of magic, at unwinding things, at – when the situation called for it – winding them back together.

Extricating things from the oil-dark slicks of magic they swam in was what he did best.

“Yes,” he said again, looking at the ring in its hiding spot in the floor of an old shack. “Yes, I can remove the wards, and the curses, and then we can destroy it.”

 

vi.

“There are innumberable curses layered over that thing,” mused Regulus, peering down into the dark hole of the floor.

When they’d finally seen what the horcrux _was,_ he’d almost laughed. From his position hovering over the ring swathed in dark magic, eyeing it critically but careful not to touch, he was just able to make out the Peverell coat of arms etched into the black stone. The heraldic design, of course, was better known in recent years as the symbol Grindlewald had used, but Regulus had grown up studying family trees and the sacred Twenty-Eight and all their coats and mottos, and he knew perfectly well the Gaunts were descendants of a Peverell, and that this ring – which must be one of theirs – was quite old indeed.

Trust a man like the dark lord to take a priceless family heirloom and ruin it beyond all recognition.

For a moment he was almost sad they couldn’t bring Sirius along. He would have thought this was hilarious.

 

v.

They made it through the wards and to the door of the Gaunt house. A shack, really – a filthy hovel. He recoiled in disgust when he realized that the skeletal remains of a snake were nailed to the door. That, he supposed, was on par with the dark lord’s family – carrying an ancient, noble gift, able to speak the tongue of snakes like Salazar himself, they turned on the creatures they should have easily made loyal to them and treated them as morbid decorations.

No wonder he’d tortured his own followers.

The snake on the door served as a reminder that no matter how _good_ he’d been, or rather, he supposed, how bad – how _loyal_ a Death Eater, how willing to carry out the dark lord’s vicious will – it wouldn’t have mattered. It would always have ended in his death or imprisonment, one way or another. To be a loyal Death Eater would _always_ have destroyed him, because whatever Voldemort said, he did not reward loyalty. He rewarded nothing but his own ends.

“Does it bother you that the man you swore yourself to came from this?” asked Fleur neutrally at his side.

He didn’t answer. Didn’t need to.

“Good,” she said simply.

 

iv.

Eventually their research led them to a house – a cottage outside of Little Hangleton, the last known home of the Gaunts. After everything they’d dug up Regulus knew perfectly well that Lord Voldemort was, in fact, a half-blood named Tom Riddle, that he’d spent his early years in an orphanage. It was one thing to know that and another thing, he thought, to see the pitiful house where the dark lord’s mother had grown up.

Regulus knew that if his own mother had seen this house, he’d have never become a Death Eater. He’d have been forbidden to.

Funny to think that poverty and blood would’ve trumped things like morality and the threat of murder.

He looked at the house, and he thought about his own home, the once-glorious Grimmauld Place which felt, some days, like an enemy to him. He thought of all the ways that family could warp you, how fealty to the wrong people could leave you with a black stain like ink over your heart that you’d never quite get off.

 

iii.

Regulus knew, ostensibly, that they were doing the right thing. That he and his brother and the beautiful woman from the future who had landed in their world and upended everything were doing, if not the _only_ right thing, then at least _something_ right.

They had, after all, according to Fleur, already changed the course of history.

Some days, though, when he went to work and lied to people and went home and lied to his mother’s portrait and ate dinner with Kreacher who he mercifully had no need to lie to, he wondered if the right thing was meant to feel this _uncertain._

He’d been a good son once, _the_ good son once, had held his mother in high regard, or at least tried to. He had valued his family above all else and then he’d turned his back on it. He had betrayed them. He knew that he’d had to, or rather, and more importantly, he knew that he’d _wanted_ to, when it came down to it, when he was faced with that crucial moment of choice - still, it was difficult, if not impossible, to ignore the part of him that said _this is who you are_ , that said _this is what you’re meant to be._

He was no longer sure who he was meant to be, or even who he was. A turncoat Death Eater? Sometime harbor-er of a wanted criminal and a kidnapped child? Amateur horcrux hunter? Someday soon, perhaps, when the dark lord inevitably returned, a spy?

He was sixteen when he joined the dark lord, and eighteen when he betrayed him. He was thirty-two now, twice the age he had been when he had taken the Dark Mark, and some days he hardly felt any wiser or any surer.

He hoped that when they found this next horcrux that he’d feel surer, or at least less like he was stumbling in the dark.

He hoped he’d get to try his hand at destroying it.

 

ii.

It was largely left to him and Fleur to follow up on her findings, to trace Tom Riddle back to his origins. It was summer, and the twins had just finished their third year at Beauxbâtons, and Sirius' task was to away from any sensitive research. Every time Regulus took his illegal Portkey to the house in France Fleur had found all those years ago, where they had secreted away the boy who used to be Harry Potter, he found the two teenagers whispering in a corner or racing after each other through the halls. Sirius followed them as best he could, distracting them with offers of Quidditch games and Exploding Snap, but they slipped away like eels every time he turned his back.

Just when Regulus thought he’d finally constructed a privacy ward the thirteen-year-olds couldn’t weasel their way through, he discovered that they’d gotten their snake, a white viper with eyelashes they called Searlait, to sneak around the house listening and relay her findings to them. Harry, of course, was the only Parselmouth, but the snake was a magical breed, and they’d somehow gotten her to understand French and English.

Regulus found the whole thing unsettling, teenagers and snakes both, and Fleur laughed like it was the funniest thing on earth.

“They’re going to be terrible in a few years,” he cautioned his brother after edging his way out of the library where he’d found Briony perched on the settee with the viper wrapped around her shoulders.

“Worse than I was? Worse than _you_ were?”

“I was a Death Eater and you were a teen runaway, among other things, so no, I suppose not.”

“They know things are going to get serious, someday,” Sirius said, reminding Regulus that the twins had grown up with some sort of general understanding that their mother – adoptive, in Harry’s case – had traveled backwards in time. They knew that the years they lived had, so far as Fleur was concerned, already happened, and that things had ended poorly. He supposed that was bound to take a toll on a young psyche. 

He remembered how he’d moved around his own home at that age – sticking to the shadows, loathe to draw anyone’s attention. At the thought, he found himself oddly fond of his pseudo-niece and nephew. He had undertaken this task to defeat the dark lord – protecting Harry Potter had been secondary at best, and then only important in that his continued existence was its own assurance of power against Voldemort. But as the years passed, as he was called again and again to this house in a lavender field in the countryside where laughter echoed through the halls and sun streamed through the windows in a way that it never had in his own, he wondered if that secondary goal hadn’t become more significant.

 

i.

Fleur called him. “I’ve been doing research,” she said without prelude as soon as he admitted her head into his fireplace.

“Oh,” he said, “so you _haven’t_ just been playing house.”

She sniffed. “I could have left you to die in that cave.”

“Charming as ever,” he shot back.

“Do you want to know what I have found, or no?”

“ _Oui,”_ he said, more agreeably. “Go on, then.”

“Tom Riddle,” she announced with relish.

“Who?”

She sighed. “Tom Riddle – Lord Voldemort. They are one and the same. I have finally located sources who went to school with the dark lord – sources who were willing to tell me what they knew.”

He doesn’t doubt that – people were willing, if they were able, to tell Fleur just about anything. He thought often about how much easier life would be if he were part Veela. Still. “ _Tom?”_

“An… ordinary name, yes. I believe he was a halfblood, or so his classmates say, but I must do more work. Track him down. Will you help me? If we find out who he was, and where he lived, we may find another horcrux.”

“I’ll help,” he said, as though it weren’t a forgone conclusion.

 

**  
**

**diary//albus//history**

vii.

He held the destroyed diary between two fingers as if it were a dirty sock.

 _You got into my school again,_ he thought. He was not overly surprised. He had always suspected – assumed – that Tom Riddle would find his way back someday. He had held the castle in as high a regard as he ever held anything – which had not, of course, stopped him, or what remained of him, from nearly forcing its closure once again. Well – he’d always had a funny way of caring for things.

Admittedly, Albus hadn't expected to see him again in the form of stationary. Which was not to discount it - the diary was a clever bit of magic, just as Tom had always been clever. It had managed quite a lot for a book and, in the end, he suspected it had intended to drain the life from one of his professors. He was lucky to have caught things in time. He was still down a teacher – the Healers told him that Gilderoy Lockhart was unlikely to recover any time soon – but at least the poor man was alive.

He sighed.

What a year it had been. It would have been nice to think that things were over, but if the diary was what he suspected, he imagined they’d only just begun.

 

vi.

“Professor Lockhart,” he started, addressing the man crouching over a sink in one of Hogwarts' girl's toilets. “I admit I had not expected to see you here.”

“Dumbledore,” hissed Lockhart, in a way that Lockhart had never addressed him but was nonetheless familiar.

“Ah,” he said, the pieces of the puzzle finally clicking together. “Tom,” he replied, genially. “I’m afraid I can’t let you do this.” He glanced toward where the man ought to be holding a wand and found that instead he was clutching a book – a black leather journal of some kind. He couldn’t imagine Gilderoy Lockhart owning something so plain, so he assumed it to be the source of their present predicament. He cast a quick spell, disarming the other man, in a sense. The diary flew across the room. The blond man hissed, though he couldn't tell if it was Parseltongue or only an expression of discontent.

After that, it was almost easy to subdue the book and convey the unconscious Professor Lockhart to the infirmary before summoning the Aurors. The tricky bit was figuring out what to do with the diary. It seemed to have a piece of Tom Riddle in it.

 

v.

When he tracked down his missing Defense professor, Albus Dumbledore was rather surprised to find that he had also, apparently, tracked down the person responsible for opening the Chamber of Secrets and letting loose whatever creature had been petrifying the students of his school. He wondered for a moment if he should let the man open the entrance to the chamber, as it seemed he was about to do, but then realized he had no way of knowing what might come out, and the Board of Governors was threatening to have him removed if this went on, anyway.

 

iv.

Albus wondered, as the events of what would have been Harry Potter’s second year of Hogwarts unfolded, how differently this term might have gone if the boy had been there.

He was certain the boy was alive – his instruments told him as much, and had done so since the boy had first vanished from his aunt and uncle’s house eleven years ago. In an odd way, he supposed he was glad that he wasn’t there at the school – he couldn’t imagine surviving the killing curse only to be felled by a creature outside one’s own classroom.

 _I really must put a stop to mess soon,_ he thought.

Wherever he was, he hoped the boy was faring well.

 

iii.

 _Enemies of the heir, beware_ , the writing on the wall said. He wondered who the heir in question might be. He could think of only one person who could claim that title, and he’d left the school many years before.

But then, thought Albus, history did have a funny way of repeating itself. Things often happened much the same as they had before; time, it sometimes seemed, went both forwards and backwards.

 

ii.

Albus felt the presence of something ominous before the year even began – a foreboding, or forewarning. It happened at times. It had happened last year before the sorting that wasn’t – the sorting that ought to have included Harry Potter but didn’t. He attributed it, when he was of a mind to attribute it to anything at all, to the wisdom in the castle’s old stones, the age in them, their collected history. Sometimes they seemed to resonate with something like history – something far older and wiser, certainly, than him.

i.

A letter had gone out to Harry Potter. Its reply never came.

 

**  
**

**locket//fleur//beginnings**

vii.

The years passed.

People who had the luxury of it forgot. Fleur’s wounds scabbed over, eventually, and one day the thought of everything she’d left behind was little more than a silvery scar.

The toddler with the shock of dark hair who had once been called Harry Potter grew.

Fleur laid out a plan, based on everything she remembered, on everything she’d ever learned or overheard, and when she was done, she told the brothers _this is how we’ll do it. This is how we defeat him._

 

vi.

It was late. The others were long since asleep, and Fleur stood alone, an unnecessary guard in the nursery. The words of Regulus Black’s dramatic little note in the fake locket rung through her head.

_I face death in the hope that when you meet your match, you will be mortal once more._

_His match_ , she thought, staring down into the crib that held the child Harry Potter. She knew the boy he’d grow up to be. She saw the shadow of that boy in his face, the contours of him in this baby’s cheekbones.

_There is a prophecy-_

She reached down to smooth an unruly black curl.

“Well,” she murmured herself in the quiet room, “ _il n’y rien à y faire_.” She supposed, in the end, that she could only do so much to change the course of history. She could call Harry by another name, pretend to be his mother, _really_ be his mother, but he would always be Harry Potter. He would always have to face Lord Voldemort, someday.

But not him alone.

Perhaps, ultimately, it would come down to this child, but she did not see why a man who split himself into pieces should not have to face as many enemies as he had slivers of soul.

_Your match, there is a prophecy, the one who will conquer the dark lord…_

She believed in prophecy. She meant what she told Sirius Black. But she believed, likewise, in fate, and she felt Regulus’ note had that ring to it. _You will be mortal once more—_

 _Yes,_ she thought at the shadow of Voldemort, _You will._

_We’ll see to it._

v.

Regulus re-appeared just after the stroke of midnight holding a bundle of blankets that revealed itself to be the baby Harry Potter. He was sleeping peacefully – magically induced, Fleur had little doubt – but even with his eyes closed there was no question that this was Harry. The famous lightning scar on his forehead was still fresh – it was a vivid red against his skin. Fleur traced it with one finger as Sirius reached to take him as if on instinct.

“I can’t believe you made me _abduct a child,”_ said Regulus as he turned him over to Sirius, who seemed to check him over. Fleur cast a simple spell to do the same.

“Mm, well, we could hardly have had Sirius do it,” said Fleur reasonably. “He is a wanted man.”

“I’ll be a wanted man if anyone finds out what I’ve done,” groused Regulus.

“Will they?” she asked. “Find out?”

“No,” said Regulus. “I got in without a problem. The wards were there – you were right about them – but I think they were intent-based; they didn’t even try to stop me since I suppose I didn’t mean him harm. The muggles were asleep when I came in. They never woke.”

“Good,” she nodded, then gestured toward the baby Sirius held. “May I? He will sleep a while yet, I think,” she said. He handed the baby over wordlessly, still seemingly uncertain of his role in this scenario, and Fleur slipped away to the room where her own child slept.

She set him down in Briony’s crib, thinking she could conjure another later – for now, it would do neither baby any harm to have company in their sleep. She remembered being a little girl, letting Gabrielle, then a toddler, climb into bed with her every time she had nightmares.

The other Fleur, this timeline’s Fleur, was a child herself somewhere, and Gabrielle was not yet born. It was a strange thought. She had always loved her sister more than anything or anyone – anyone, she supposed, until Briony. Bill, she admitted privately, would have had to come third. She didn’t think he’d have minded. He understood the bonds between siblings.

She’d often thought what a shame it was that Briony would likely grow up without one.

But now – now that she thought of it, here, she supposed, was her chance. She could raise the children together, Harry and Briony, and they would be as good as siblings. She could return to France – somewhere remote, where she would not chance running into her parents, but where she could watch her sister, when she was eventually born, grow up from a distance.

She returned to the sitting room where the Black brothers waited with that thought in mind.

“It’s probably for the best that we took him,” Regulus admitted begrudgingly when she’d rejoined their conversation. “They were keeping him in some sort of cupboard under the stairs. Is that an ordinary thing for muggles to do?”

“No,” said Fleur tightly, and noted with approval that Sirius Black looked incandescently angry.

She had long held the suspicion that Harry Potter’s muggle relatives were unsavory people, and wondered now how long they might have kept him in that cupboard if Regulus hadn’t come along. “They have another child, yes? The muggles?”

“Er,” said Regulus. “Yes. I put a sleeping spell on him while I was searching for Harry, just in case. He was about the same age, I think.”

“And _he_ was not in a cupboard?” asked Fleur.

“No – a rather well-appointed nursery.”

She frowned. “Very well.”

“You weren’t going to make me kidnap _another_ child, were you?” asked Regulus with dawning horror.

“Well, if it were _necessary—”_

“Okay,” cut in Sirius, who still looked furious. “So it’s done. Harry’s safe. Now… now what? I don’t know the first thing about taking care of a kid, and I don’t know where we’re going to _go,_ and I agree that it was the best thing to do now, _obviously,_ and remind me to go kill Petunia later – Merlin, woman, I’m only kidding, put your claws away – but what _now?”_

 _What now_ indeed, thought Fleur, after glaring heartily at Sirius – they didn’t need _another_ murder charge to contend with. She had an idea, though. “Your brother speaks French,” she said to Sirius. “Do you?”

“Yeah,” said Sirius slowly. “We both learned as children. You want to go to France? You want _me_ to go to France?”

“Yes,” she said, the plan that had begun to form in the nursery growing. “I think it is our best chance – no one will be looking for Sirius Black there. Even if they think you have stolen Harry, they will not think to look for a Frenchman with two children instead of one.”

“Two?”

She shrugged. “Yes, I think you pose as my husband – we pretend the children are twins. It is a good disguise.” She’d already thought that much through, and the issue of Harry’s appearance – his scar, his eyes. Those were the things people would look for. There were ways to hide the scar – cosmetic magic was prevalent in the circles she came from, spells passed from mother to daughter, and she could think of a dozen off the top of her head that could move or discolor or reshape the distinctive mark on the toddler’s head and render it unrecognizable. And while his green eyes were striking, and she hated to change any part of him that came from his poor parents, but she suspected Lily Potter would not begrudge her any act that would protect her son. To change them would mean, she thought, giving him some of her blood, but that in and of itself might help him. Even the slightest trace of Veela magic would offer him abilities and affinities and protections. He would need all of those that he could get.

“Sorry, what?” Sirius, who seemed to be about ten steps behind, alas, was saying. “I’m not going to—”

“You will,” she said firmly. “For Harry, you will. There are other ways, of course, but this is the easiest – the safest. Anyway, what is the alternative? Staying on the run for years?”

“Until we find Peter.”

“Which could take a _very_ long time,” she reminded. “How many rats exist in England? In the world? And what do you know of raising a baby, for that matter? You need my help.”

“What about Regulus, then?” Sirius argued, his arms crossed in front of him still. “What’s he going to do?”

Regulus coughed and made his presence known for the first time, having apparently determined the conversation up to that point had little to do with him. “I was thinking I’d just – stay where I was. Keep my head down for a while, get a job…”

“Bollocks,” said Sirius. “You’re a marked Death Eater! You’ll be arrested and tried.”

“I could say I was under the _Imperius_ ,” he said. “Mother would back me and throw a bit of gold around if it was to keep me out of Azkaban – you know she would.”

“That will _never_ work,” said Sirius.

“I’ve heard rumors it’s what Lucius Malfoy plans to do.”

“Well, if _Malfoy_ is doing it,” said Sirius incredulously.

Fleur intervened again. “It may work,” she said, recalling, after all, that Lucius Malfoy had certainly been walking around a free man in her own time, “And it would be very useful to have someone in the Ministry,” she added, with a pointed look at Regulus. “That is where you said you were headed, _non?_ And if it doesn’t work, I suppose you can join us in hiding.”

“Perish the thought,” said Regulus. “I’d rather wander the world homeless and penniless than shack up with my brother and two infants.”

“They are your niece and nephew, now,” said Fleur, smiling pointedly at him.

“I haven’t agreed to anything,” said Sirius.

She shrugged as if that were inconsequential. So far as she was concerned, it was.

 

iv.

“I am not writing to Sirius.”

“You have to,” she insisted. “Something will happen soon if we don’t stop it. Do you know Lily and James Potter?”

“Yeees,” said Regulus slowly, drawing out the word. “They’re friends of Sirius’. Why?”

“There will be an attack in a little less than two years. You-Know-Who – he will attack the Potters and kill them, and be defeated by their son.”

“They haven’t got—”

“He’ll be born in July next year,” she said before Regulus could finish his thought. He would, in fact, she realized now, be born two months after her own daughter, a funny thought. They would be nearly the same age.

“You’re saying the dark lord will be defeated by a baby,” he said flatly.

“His curse will rebound, yes. Harry Potter will be – a hero, I suppose. A household name. You-Know-Who will disappear for thirteen years before he is reborn.”

“ _How?_ And why would the dark lord target the Potters personally? I mean – they’re Aurors, certainly, and I’m sure they’re in the Order, but…”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “The Potters are supposed to have gone into hiding sometime soon – after Harry is born, I think. Your brother will be accused of betraying their location to You-Know-Who. He will be arrested and spend twelve years in Azkaban before he breaks out.”

“He wouldn’t,” said Regulus. “Even I know that. Sirius would _never_ join the dark lord, and he’d certainly never do anything to harm James Potter.”

She nodded. “Yes – that I do know. He will be framed by Peter Pettigrew.”

“ _Pettigrew?_ That makes more sense that Sirius, I suppose, but he’s not a Death Eater either – not that I know of.”

“Perhaps not yet? I do not know when he joined.”

“Yeah, well, it’ll be hard to tell Sirius his friend’s a Death Eater if he’s _not_ one. He’d never believe me either way, but without even having proof…”

It did turn out to be harder than they imagined to get Sirius Black to listen to his brother’s claim – hard, in this case, meaning impossible. Letters returned unanswered, and when Regulus tried to corner him in Diagon Alley, Sirius cursed him viciously, and Regulus was forced to Apparate away before his brother abused his Auror authority to arrest him and expose him as a Death Eater.

1979 turned into 1980 and winter into spring, and then summer, and her daughter was born. Fleur named her Briony – a British name for a girl born in London, after a persistent climbing vine, because she represented, if nothing else, her own resilience.

Before long Harry Potter was born, too, and Fleur was afraid that there was nothing they could do to stop the events of the following October from unfolding. Fleur even tried writing Lily and James Potter directly, but the owl returned to her, confused – it seemed that they’d already gone into hiding.

“If Sirius wasn’t such a stubborn _prick,”_ said Regulus around the time that Briony began to walk. “Serves him right if he _does_ go to Azkaban. We _tried.”_

“He is still your brother,” insisted Fleur. “Anyway – if we do not reach him in time, the Potters will die. Harry will be an orphan.” _Again,_ she didn’t say, but she glanced towards the door of the room where her daughter slept, already one parent short, a tiny, ferocious thing with a cap of blonde curls and grey-blue eyes. She resembled Fleur more closely than her father, she thought with a pang, but there was, over her nose, a soft constellation of freckles that were undeniably his.

Regulus, who had been pacing a track in her floor, stopped and sighed. “Is there anything you can do? Can you trace him? You traced _me.”_

“I had contact with you,” she frowned. “There are ways to find him – scrying, certain spells – but only if he’s under no protections.”

“It’s Sirius,” said Regulus flatly. “Even if he’s under protection, he’ll slip up. He’ll lose his grip, lose his temper, and go somewhere he’s not supposed to. We’ll find him that way.”

Fleur agreed and began to prepare the spell she would use, although she had her suspicions about when his slip might be.

Her suspicions proved correct. Halloween 1981 came and went, and Regulus remained holed up in her flat as the dark lord fell. She watched him watch in awe as his mark faded and sent a silent prayer for forgiveness towards James and Lily Potter.

And then, with the country in chaos, her spell alerted her to the presence of Sirius Black. “I have to go,” she told Regulus. “Stay with my daughter, let no one in—”

“Go,” he said quickly, appearing, at the last moment, to care for his brother’s safety.

She found Sirius Black in the moments before the explosion that was to kill a dozen muggles in the street, and managed to throw a shield up just in time. She wasn’t clear on how he’d survived this the first time, but her shield, she noted, just before Apparating away with him, managed to cover at least half of the muggles who would otherwise have died. She grimaced but chose to view it as an improvement.

“Who the fuck are you?” he spat as soon as they arrived in her flat. “Let me go!”

“ _Petrificus totalus,”_ said Regulus, who immediately took his brother’s wand and began searching the pockets of his robes for any spares. “Nice to see you too, Sirius.”

Sirius glared mutinously from where he’d fallen to the floor. Fleur rolled her eyes and levitated him to the sofa when Regulus’ search was complete.

“Hello,” she said soothingly. “Sorry we had to, ah – well. My name is Fleur, and you know your brother, of course.” She paused, wondering where to start. Sirius looked furiously angry and had just lost two of his best friends, so it seemed best to smooth things over as quickly as possible. “I’m from the future, and I am here to help kill Voldemort.” It was nice to have the Taboo over with, at least. “Your brother is helping me,” she added.

“Have you heard of horcruxes?” asked Regulus.

Fleur imagined Sirius narrowed his eyes minutely, but that was all the spell would allow.

“Voldemort has them,” said Regulus. “Plural. We’ve destroyed one, but there are others, and we’re going to find them all.”

“I swear on my magic that what I have said is true,” added Fleur, letting the warm glow of magical oath wash over them. “Regulus, perhaps you can free him now?” she asked, keeping her wand trained on Sirius nonetheless.

Regulus did so, and Fleur asked Sirius if he had any questions.

“Yes. _Why am I here?”_

“Ah, two reasons,” said Fleur. “The first is that you are going to be accused of betraying the Potters – no,” she said quickly before he could speak, “ _we_ know it was Pettigrew, but no one else will.”

“I _had_ Peter!” roared Sirius. “If you hadn’t taken me—”

“Then you would have been arrested shortly and framed for his murder along with the Potters’,” said Regulus. “She's seen it all happen before, so I'd believe her, were I you. Anyway - you’re hardly any use in Azkaban.”

“What use am I _here?”_

“Well, for one thing,” said Fleur, “Harry Potter – you are his godfather, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Good, yes. We must kidnap him,” said Fleur, who had, admittedly, only come to that conclusion very recently.

“ _What?”_ sputtered Sirius. “You want to – what? No. Why?”

She shrugged. It seemed to her to be the only option. “I have been to the place he was raised, in my own time. It was not so good. His relatives did not care for him. His aunt, his mother’s sister, I think – she was not fond of him. I did not know him very well, but I know he hated it.” She thought back on the night they’d flown Harry away from Privet Drive. He’d left it behind without a second glance. “You are his godfather,” she said. “If you are not to go to Azkaban, why should he stay there?”

“They’ve sent him to live with Petunia?” Sirius frowned.

“Yes. You’ve met her?”

“Not exactly,” said Sirius. “She didn’t go to James and Lily’s wedding, but they went to hers – James called her a jealous shrew. She and Lily hadn’t gotten on in years. Why would they…”

“I do not know,” said Fleur. She omitted that she thought Dumbledore had had his reasons – those reasons had been alluded to more than once. But since she didn’t know them, and couldn’t imagine them trumping a child’s happiness. She remembered Harry as she met him first – a shy, kind fourteen-year-old who’d seemed younger than his years, a boy who’d rescued her sister in a tournament task even though he hadn’t needed to. It was hard to imagine him hating his relatives enough that he wouldn’t care to say goodbye to them without very good cause.

“Can I just put in here that I think this is a very bad idea?” said Regulus, who had not been privy to this portion of her plan.

“You can,” she agreed, “but I think you will have to be the one to kidnap him, so I do not think it matters if you think it’s a bad idea or no.”

 

iii.

Regulus Black’s house elf took them to the opening of a dark and dreary cave. She did not know where they were, but imagined it must be somewhere in Great Britain. Nowhere else could be so abysmally gray and cold.

He led them through the cave’s defenses, and Fleur would have known, even without the word of the elf, that this cave held something of Voldemort’s. The magic was black and dense and threatened to choke her.

When they arrived at the basin of poison where Kreacher claimed Voldemort had left a locket, Regulus nobly said he would swallow the potion, and Fleur, though she did feel badly for him, agreed – she had no way of knowing what the poison would do to her baby, but couldn’t take the risk.

He grew steadily wilder and more desperate as he drank, trying to reach the lake full of Inferi for water, and Fleur made the Kreacher, who was tugging frantically at his ears, help her keep his master away from the lake’s edge. “I think he has to drink it all,” she told the elf. “I’m sorry. I’ll make sure he is okay, after.”

She did intend to, too – Regulus, after all, had made himself vulnerable in telling her that the locket he was making from Kreacher’s memory was a fake that he intended to use to replace the one Kreacher had been made to help hide in the cave. He’d risked himself further in telling her that he thought the original locket was a horcrux, and in describing his plan to replace it.

As soon as the meaning of that word, of _horcrux_ was explained to Fleur, she realized that this must have been what Regulus discovered that set off her spell - that Voldemort had made steps towards rendering himself immortal, that he'd split his soul. It made sense. She had often wondered why he hadn't died for good that night in Godric's Hollow.

She realized something else, too – that there were probably more of them.

She remembered a story Bill had told her – a story about a twelve-year-old Harry Potter, and how he had saved Bill’s younger sister from a monster brought forth by what they called a fragment of Voldemort, something carried into Hogwarts in a diary. Harry, he’d said, had destroyed the diary, and the fragment had gone with it.

 _A horcrux._ It had to be – and that meant that there were others. She ruminated on this as she helped Kreacher replace the locket in the bowl with the fake, the _clever_ fake that Regulus had already been in the process of making when she’d arrived at Grimmauld Place. He’d written a note, too, which she’d dissuaded him from using, with a quick and unseen roll of her eyes at the missive’s dramatics.

_It was I who discovered your secret…_

“Perhaps we _don’t_ tell him that,” Fleur said.

With the lockets switched, they returned to Fleur’s apartment with Kreacher’s help and she began to assist Regulus in recovering just like she’d promised.

“Regulus,” she said apologetically when he was no longer at the verge of death, “there is something I should tell you.” After seeing that he would risk his life to destroy this thing of Voldemort’s, she knew that she could trust him – or trust him, at least, to have the right priorities.

And so she told him the truth.

He did not take it entirely well.

“You’re _out of your mind_ if you think I’m going to work with you!” he said when she was done, and when she proposed to him that they continue to work against Voldemort together. “You lied to me, you betrayed me! You put a _tracking spell_ on me!”

“We have the same objective,” said Fleur. “We both want the same things – and would you have done any differently?”

“Yes!”

“Look at it this way, then – I saved your life. If I had not been there, you would have died, no?”

“Maybe! I don’t know! Yes, alright,” he said, deflating, “I would have died, probably. But I was _ready_ to die. It was… it was for a good cause.”

“It was,” she agreed readily, “but perhaps not so well thought-out just the same. I imagine you had another reason, too – you don’t see any way out of your current… what is the word? Predicament.”

“It wasn’t _suicide_ ,” hissed Regulus.

“No, because you aren’t dead,” she agreed, declining to point out the note that had clearly meant he _thought_ he would be dead by now. “And that is a good thing, because I think that there are more of these – these horcruxes. I would like to help you find them.”

“ _More?”_

“I think so, yes. I told you he came back in my time, didn’t I? He did so more than once, in a way of speaking.”

“Yes, well, I expected he would come back, but I thought that he would be destroyed, then. I didn’t think…”

“ _Oui,_ well. He is very mad.”

“Yes,” said Regulus, laughing a little hysterically. “I’m aware. How… how many, do you know?”

“I don’t,” she said apologetically. She wished she did. So far as she could tell, their best bet was just to keep hunting them until they had a better idea, and she said as much.

“Right,” said Regulus. “Well, I guess maybe I can… I mean, it would be foolish _not_ to use this obvious advantage; you know the _future,_ you… alright. Fine, yes, I’ll work with you.”

“I knew you would come around,” she said.

He snorted, still, it seemed, a little stung by her betrayal. Still, she was glad not to have to pretend anymore. It was nice to have an ally, and nice to be seen as she really was.

“Is there anything we can do now?” he asked. “I mean, I assume you don’t know where any other horcruxes are, but do you know where to _start_ , or…”

“Not exactly,” she said. “I will have to think. You can help me. But… ah. There is one thing.”

“Which is?”

“I think you need to write to your brother.”

 

ii.

When she arrived, her first thought had been to find a place to stay. She had secured one quickly, and then a job, and with those matters out of the way, there came the question of what to do next.

She had traveled back in time with the thought of defeating Voldemort, and landed in the middle of his first war, so the answer of what to do next might have been obvious, but she didn’t feel that tracking down the Order of the Phoenix and proving herself useful in some way was the right path. Her intention was to do things _differently._ She had joined the Order in her first go-round at life, and things had not gone the way she planned – so this time, instead, she tracked down the Death Eaters.

To understand the war, to understand what Voldemort’s current strengths and strategies were, she needed to find one of his people and worm her way inside his head. (A _he,_ she determined, would likely be her best bet - she was eminently conscious of her own best qualities).

She began to search in earnest for their weakest link.

Her first thought was Severus Snape. She found him easily enough, and he was only a teenager recently graduated from Hogwarts, sallow-faced and hook-nosed with insecurities she could spot from a mile away. However, she also recalled him as suspicious and secretive, and well-versed in the mind arts, so she struck him off her list. But there was a boy even younger than he that trailed after him – seventeen or eighteen, thin and uncertain and obviously looking for something. She did not know what that something was, but then, she thought, he might not either – so perhaps that was her opening.

His name was Regulus Black, and it was clear that he was a relative of the famed Sirius Black, who she had never met but knew from her time in the Order was an outcast to his family and innocent of the crimes he had yet to be accused of. She soon found, sitting in a darkened corner of a pub and listening to the other people she knew to be young Death Eaters, that Regulus was in fact his younger brother, overshadowed by his elder brother’s charm and general popularity. Sirius had become an Auror straight out of school, and Regulus had become a Death Eater, apparently.

She selected him and found that he made an easy target.

All she had to do, in the end, was wait until his friends had left him in one of a series of dubious pubs – a favorite haunting, apparently, of all the younger Death Eaters – and corner him in a booth.

“Do you mind if I sit ‘ere?” she asked, sidling up to the table and accenting her English more than strictly necessary. “Everywhere else eez full.”

It was true, but only because she’d sent a minor compulsion spell towards the booth where she’d sat until then willing some other patron to come select it.

“Er,” said Regulus Black uncertainly without looking up. “I don’t think…” he said, and then trailed off as he glanced at her, blinking wildly.

She smiled encouragingly.

“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt,” he blinked.

“ _Merci,”_ she said. “My name is Fleur.”

“ _Enchanté_ , mademoiselle,” he said. “Je m’appele Regulus.”

“Oh!” she said delightedly. “Vous parlez français!” Her surprise was genuine, if a little overplayed.

“A little,” he agreed, ducking his head.

She sighed internally. It was almost too simple.

They spoke for nearly an hour, Fleur being the best conversationalist she could manage, claiming that she had recently moved to England and had yet to make friends – true enough – and extracting a promise from him to meet again soon. Over the course of the next two months, she managed to become a regular acquaintance of Regulus Black’s. They met in pubs and she ordered Butterbeer and demurred when she was offered anything stronger and she gleaned as much information from the youngest Black as she could.

He never admitted anything regarding the mark on his arm to her directly – he was far too clever for that – but through his allusions to his friends and associates and the timing of the excuses he made for being unable to meet, she was able to ascertain his general movements and get a sense of Voldemort’s by extension. The papers reported on public attacks, but not as many as she would think. It was only through Regulus’ varying moods, his shifts from ill-tempered to drawn and panicky, that she was able to tell when things were occurring with the Death Eaters behind scenes.

By October 1981, she knew, this first war would be over, so she could imagine that it was to reach its zenith sometime in the following year.

She wanted to find something significant to use against Voldemort before that – before he vanished for however many years – and felt that time was running out.

With that thought, she devised a spell to place on Regulus Black.

It was a tracking spell of sorts, but one triggered by a specific stimulus – in this case, the obtaining of some significant knowledge about the man who called himself Lord Voldemort. In the event of such a realization, she would feel a tug on her magic and she would then be able to follow it to wherever Regulus was and, hopefully, extract the information from him. She knew the Legilimancy spell – she wasn’t especially adept at it, but she could use it if need be.

The tracking spell was subtle, difficult work. She would have lamented that people rarely considered her abilities with such particular charms work, despite charms being her specialty, but she’d generally found that it was best to be underestimated.

Waiting, too, was difficult work, but that was another specialty.

Finally, in December of 1979, several months after she had arrived and befriended Regulus Black, her spell activated. She Apparated cautiously, hoping she wasn’t set to appear in front of Voldemort himself. There were safeguards in place to prevent that sort of thing, but it was hardly as if she’d had a chance to test them.

Thankfully, though, she found herself on an ordinary street of townhouses.

As she pondered the significance of her location, the row of houses in front of her seemed to unfold, revealing a number 12 where previously only 11 and 13 had appeared. _Unplottable, then_ , she thought. She had her suspicions as to the house’s occupants. Hoping she wasn’t setting herself up for trouble, she walked up the front steps and knocked sharply at the front door.

It was some time before the door opened, revealing a tearstained Regulus Black. He looked to be in the middle of a crisis, and he regarded Fleur as if she were an apparition. “What…?”

“Regulus,” she said, “are you okay?”

“I.. no. I’m not bloody okay. What are you _doing_ here? How did you…”

“I have not seen you in many days,” she improvised quickly. “I was worried.”

“Now’s really not a good time,” he said, sounding on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

She discovered, over the course of their acquaintance, that Regulus had his doubts about the war. He didn’t seem to care for his role as a Death Eater, and it was obvious that if he could find a way out, he would take it. It was nice to know that he wasn’t wholly invested in his tasks. It would not have mattered to her either way – when she was done obtaining the information she desired, she intended to vanish with him none the wiser – but still, it helped to know that the person with whom she spent so much time was not altogether a bad person.

She wondered if he wasn’t about to try and leave the Death Eaters now – it would explain the terror in his eyes, and also why she’d never heard of him in her own timeline – she’d long suspected he’d died in the first war, and if he _had_ betrayed Voldemort, that could certainly be the cause of it.

“What’s wrong?” she asked now. “Have you been cursed? Are you hurt?”

“I,” he blinked. “No, it’s not me, it’s my elf.”

She frowned. “Your…elf?” she repeated, wondering if she’d misunderstood.

“My house elf,” he confirmed. It was her turn to blink then – she had never seen someone distraught over a house elf, and rather thought his concern for a magical creature was a tally in his favor.

“Can I help?” she asked, really meaning it. “I have some skill with healing magic. I know spells that work on creatures,” she added, alluding to her own heritage, which had never come up in their conversations but was, she knew, rather obvious.

That seemed to do the trick, because he gestured for her to come in and closed the door quickly behind her. “Thank you. He’s – my mother is out, thank Merlin, and – he’s through here.” He pulled her up flight after flight of stairs to what must have been his bedroom, where she found a wizened house elf on the verge of death laying on Regulus’ bed, coughing and having a fit.

“What _‘appened_ to ‘im?” she asked, distressed.

“A potion,” said Regulus. “Poison. I’ve already given him a bezoar, but this is… I think these are the aftereffects.”

“Who would give a house elf such a potion…?” she wondered aloud. People were cruel to them, certainly, but typically they ordered them to punish themselves. She could only imagine someone poisoning an elf if they were trying out that poison’s effects – but then, given the crowd Regulus was with, she supposed that was possible.

Regulus made a sound halfway between a laugh and choking. Fleur remembered then what spell had led her here. She was certain the condition of his house elf had something to do with Voldemort – with something Regulus had discovered.

“Did You-Know-Who do this?” she asked carefully, without looking at him, keeping her wand trained on the house elf as she cast a few healing spells. She heard another choking sound behind her.

“I can’t…” said Regulus.

“I know you are a Death Eater,” she replied, with all the earnestness in her voice she could muster. “I know you are in danger, too – let me help you. I will not tell anyone. I will not get in your way.”

“You don’t understand,” Regulus said again, a little more hysterically this time. “I have to… I have to _stop_ him.”

Fleur seized her chance, not knowing what Regulus could do to stop Voldemort, but certain that she needed the knowledge. “Then I will help you stop him,” she insisted.

 

i.

It was spring at Shell Cottage. The sea lavender grew all around them, and the days grew warm, and sometimes Fleur could forget, if she closed her eyes and smelled the flowers and listened to the sea, that they were at war.

Sometimes.

There were other times when it became much harder – as when Bill’s brother and his friends appeared at the cottage with the help of a house elf, former prisoners from Malfoy Manor in tow, a situation they had just managed to explain when, in a terrible stroke of luck, Bellatrix Lestrange appeared behind them. _She must have followed the elf, somehow_ was Fleur’s last coherent thought before the dull roar of a battle began in earnest.

Fleur tried to keep calm as the deranged witch summoned someone – _Death Eaters,_ she thought, _more of them –_ and she decided what to do next.

The house elf that had helped Harry Potter and the rest was dead, which was a shame, because he might have gotten them away. Fleur grabbed the youngest of the prisoners, a slight blonde girl who reminded her of her sister, and placed the emergency portkey she kept around her neck in the girl’s hand. “The key word is _mille-feuille_ ,” she murmured in the girl’s ear. It was Gabrielle’s favorite dessert. “It will land in Alsace, near my cousin’s house. Take whoever you can.” Unauthorized international portkeys were illegal, but that hardly seemed the most of their concerns right now.

She turned just in time to see Bill dueling with Lestrange, and then a curse striking him, throwing him back. Behind Lestrange half a dozen new Death Eaters appeared.

They hadn’t bothered with masks – so few of them did, anymore, certain as they were about the outcome of this war – and that thought, somehow, was Fleur’s breaking point.

 _I have to do something,_ she thought fiercely, and just as she did, a memory came to her – a memory from when she was very small, of something her grandmother had told her.

 _Here is a spell for when there is nothing left,_ her grandmother had whispered. _A spell for when there is nothing left to be done._

 _What does it do?_ She’d asked.

 _I don’t know,_ her grandmother admitted. _Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything._

She had never tried it, did not even know if it would work, and moreover, it was Veela magic – archaic, and against most country’s laws, and wild, unpredictable. She wasn’t sure that she could even channel it as a quarter-Veela, but her grandmother, she reasoned, wouldn’t have told her if she thought it was impossible.

And so she tried.

She woke up on an empty beach.

Fleur quickly ascertained that Shell Cottage was empty. The wards had changed, but she didn’t think that the Death Eaters had changed them. There was nothing malicious in them, only a firm but friendly border and the sense that they would gently push anyone unwanted away. They let Fleur in, and she entered through the kitchen, where the cabinets were painted the wrong color.

There was no food in the cupboards, but she found old issues of the _Prophet_ in the sitting room. They were dated from the summer 1979, but had yet to yellow.

Outside, she realized slowly, it had been cool, but the lavender was in the wrong phase – it was autumn, she thought. Not spring. She was hesitant to Apparate to Diagon Alley, but she did so anyway, and found it another place entirely.

There was still, she thought, the shadow of _something_ lingering in the Alley, but it was not half-deserted as it had been in 1998. A newly bought newspaper explained why – it was, in fact, 1979. October. There were two years yet to Voldemort’s initial defeat. She had traveled back in time almost two decades, and had landed directly in the middle of the First Wizarding War.

She set about confirming when and where she was, of course, but she knew in her heart that it was true. Her grandmother’s spell had sent her _back_ , somehow, for some reason. Time travel on that scale wasn’t meant to be possible, but it had happened nonetheless, and here she was.

At the very least, she was able to walk through Diagon Alley unharassed, and she took advantage of that, renting a room in the Leaky Cauldron, even using her own name, since there was hardly any harm in it. From there she began to speculate, to wonder what she ought to do next.

In that time, she discovered something else surprising: she was pregnant. She hadn’t been for long – perhaps a few weeks; she would need to visit a Healer or learn the spells to determine more – but there was no mistaking it.

In ordinary circumstances, she would not have even considered having the baby – not during a war. She couldn’t fight the way this war called for and be a mother, both. She would have made a choice. But now this baby - a girl, she sensed, in a way particular to her strain of magic – was her last link to the world she’d left behind, her last tie to her husband, who was, in this world, only a few years old. She refused to linger long on the thought – he was alive and well, as was she, and that was what counted.

A baby would complicate things, to say the least, but it would also give her motivation to _do_ something, to sort out the mess that the wizarding world she’d left behind had been in. To stop some of the events that had taken place before they happened.

She did not think she would be able to go back. She was sure the spell she’d used didn’t work that way – it wasn’t a spell for time travel, she didn’t think, but a spell for desperate measures. It was larger and vaguer than magic meant to suit any one specific purpose, and now that she had used it, had pointed it in one direction, she doubted she would ever be able to use it again.

She had a few regrets. She imagined she always would. To say otherwise would be a lie, but this was what magic had chosen for her, this route, and she was going to make the best of it. She summoned every bit of courage and the raw strength and resiliance that were her inheritance and she decided to move forward.

Magic, at its core, was more about intent than incantation. Sometimes words were whispered at the right place, at the right time, and that was all they needed to take hold.

Sometimes beginnings presented themselves.

 

 

**epilogue//prologue//everything-in-between**

In this world, Harry Potter was not kept in the dark – not in the literal or figurative sense of the word. His bedroom was big and bright, and he did not spend any time in cupboards (though he still befriended spiders, when the chance arose).

He knew his real name, his parents’ names, and he knew, had always known, that he was magic.

He knew _James_ and _Lily_ , and he knew _Prongs_ , and he knew their wand cores and best classes and favorite foods.

He knew his father-who-wasn’t-his-father was called _Sirius_ , but never if anyone asked. He knew that his not-sister had her mother’s hair and her father’s eyes, but they could pass for Sirius’, and generally did. If anyone ever inquired after his, his mother only smiled.

And the teachers at the muggle primary school where Harry spent his formative years knew that he was a smart boy, if a little strange, with a quick temper and easy charm. They knew that his sister was his closest friend and that he was fiercely protective of his family.

They did not know that his traits, while shared by the friendly man and woman who came to parent-teacher meetings, had their source in another quick-tempered man, another woman who threw herself over her loved ones like a shield.

Or did they? Who was to say which set of them was in charge of what? Sirius taught his children how to fight and Fleur taught them when, and when to stand down, and if James and Lily had lived, wouldn’t they have done the same?

In the end, nature or nurture - it didn’t really matter.

Harry grew, and he was happy.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Have you ever gotten so frustrated with a story you were writing that you cut half of it out and flipped it around backwards? No? Just me? Cool. Well, here is it anyway.
> 
> Anyway, I'm just glad this story is finally over, bless. I've been sick off and on all month and then spent a week on vacation, so all the stuff I was working on kinda fell by the wayside except this, which has been bothering me for ages. 
> 
> Thank you for reading! Let me know what you think, if it was totally impossible to read backwards, if you liked the format, whatever. Also, I usually write sections in one straight go and almost never edit (whoops) so feel free to tell me about typos etc.


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